Things Have Changed

Your eyes do not deceive you, I do indeed have a new website. Well, not a new website; more like a gently and professionally buffed-up one. A redesign, I believe the kids are calling it, though I prefer to call it a small cosmetic surgery: the equivalent of calf implants, perhaps. Just a little boost!

Sean has been working tirelessly to get this up and running, and it is a relief to both of us that it is finally done. Didn't he do a nice job designing and building it? I wrote it into our marriage vows, see: one new site design every two years. Eh, I kid. It was every five.

The aim is that you will find this new and rejiggered version of Nothing But Bonfires not only more beautiful but also just slightly more useful. At the top, you will see a section entitled Travel Guides. For the moment, I have put together three travel guides on the places I get asked about most: San Francisco, London, and Charleston, and my hope is that if you are going to any of these places, you can pull up the travel guide on your phone---or print it if you can take the collective wince of several trees---and use it while you are on vacation. You will also, on that tab, see a section entitled Reader Travel Guides: I have made these, so far, for Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver, Rome, Paris, and Sydney & Melbourne, and they include all the suggestions that you gave us, over the years, for those trips. Clap yourselves on the back for that one! Your suggestions helped us out so much, and now we're hoping they can help other people out too.

Speaking of helping people out, I've added a Travel Q&A section in the sidebar, and here is why: I get a lot of email from people asking me the same things (how do I book a cheap flight? Where should I go on my vacation? What's the easiest way to pack light?) and I figured you know, if enough people have these questions, maybe we could all just benefit from the information being in one place. I am really, really behind on email at the moment and I feel horrible about it, so I'm hoping this will force me to get better at it---and hopefully it'll help you out if you need a little travel advice; this way, you can either search through the Q&A archives or contact me with a specifc question. You'll also notice a map functionality in the sidebar that lets you search for posts by location and find all the things I've written in, from, or about that place. This is Sean's baby and he is very, very proud of it.

So that's the travel-related stuff. What else? Well, you'll see a tab for Bad Decisions up at the top, where I'll resume adding all those everso flattering pictures of my acid-washed jeans from 1987---and probably, at some point, solicit your Bad Decisions---and you'll also notice a Craftiness section too, which I hope is going to inspire me to....you know, get a little craftier. I even bought a new corner-rounder this weekend in celebration. You may also notice that I have changed Best Things Ever to Splendid Things, partly because I was getting sick of that phrase and partly because I am trying to bring the world "splendid" back into fashion. Do you say it much? You should. I'm also experimenting with marvelous, magnificent, and tremendous. Great words, all of them.

Also in the sidebar, you'll see a link to our DIY Wedding: as you know, we did a lot of stuff for our wedding ourselves, and I thought it would be interesting to chronicle some of the projects we did and some of the details we included and some of the fun we had. If you have no interest in weddings, you just have to ignore this section completely; if, however, you were just about to email me and ask me the best place to buy envelopes for your homemade invitations, then this section is for you. (PS: It's Cards and Pockets.)

So I think that's pretty much it---apart from the updated About page, of course, which up until yesterday still said I was a) 29 and b) not a fan of Heid Montag, when really it's Ashlee Simpson Wentz who really gets up my nose these days---and the Twitter feed at the bottom which features me looking like I'm yelling at you in a very excited way, which, funnily enough, is how I often communicate in real life. Do let me know if you see any bugs or weird issues or anything---and tell me which browser you're viewing it in---and I'll pass them along to my top-of-the-line technology team, which as we all know is just Sean sitting downstairs in his cold and empty study we still haven't unpacked.

Speaking of Sean, I should give him a big thank you for working on this, because he's really done a lovely job. He builds websites the way a normal person would, say, boil a saucepan of pasta: like it's no big deal to do. How useful it was to marry a person who knows how to do stuff like this. Perhaps only a professional cheese-taster would have been a better choice. Close call, though. He'd probably still have the edge.